Folks,
In the lull before the storm of constructing MacTeX 2008, I've been
thinking about the three packages in MacTeX which directly install
packages from Gerben Wierda's distribution: Ghostscript, ImageMagick,
and the Font Utilities (primarily FontForge and the Fondu Mac Font cli
Tools). As Gerben tends to other tasks, these packages aren't keeping
up with the latest sources.
The most important is Ghostscript. I have constructed an experimental
package using the latest sources as of Febuary 29, 2008. You can
install this package, test, and then revert to the older version if
necessary. I'd appreciate further testing, particularly since the
package must run on PPC systems 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5, both with and
without X11 support, and on Intel systems 10.4 and 10.5, again both
with and without X11 support.
If you'd like to test, you can get the package at
www.uoregon.edu/~koch
Please read the "about" document just under the package link before
installing.
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On a related issue, I'm thinking about eliminating the font utilities
completely, and I'd appreciate comments. I believe these utilities are
primarily present to fully support Gerben's gtmacfonts package, which
isn't in TeX Live. We do install iInstaller, so a rare user who needed
the font utilities could easily install them that way.
Another reason to eliminate the font utilities is that the version we
install does not support X11, so a person who wanted to use the X
interface to FontForge would have to reinstall anyway. Since there are
many binaries, it wouldn't be practical to use the "-X11" and "-noX11"
approach.
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ImageMagick presents another problem. We distribute a version without
X11 support and some users have complained about that. It looks to me
like the ./configure step for ImageMagick will build in extra
conversions depending on the libraries present, so that for example if
libjpeg is missing the software will compile fine, but just not
support jpeg. Since I don't heavily use ImageMagick, I could miss such
tricky steps. One possibility is to distribute Gerben's version. Are
there ImageMagick experts reading this message?
Dick
koch at math.uoregon.edu